Towards an Agent-driven Software Architecture Aligned with User Stories

Wautelet, Yves [KU Leuven] Heng, Samedi [UCL] Kolp, Manuel [UCL] Scharff, Christelle [Pace University, USA]

Agile principles have taken an increasing importance in the last decades. Software Architecture (SA) definition is perceived as a non-agile practice as it is executed in a top-down manner, reminding waterfall development, and sometimes imposes heavy documentation. This paper proposes to systematically build an agent-oriented SA from a set of User Stories (US), the core artifact to document requirements in agile methodologies. Previous research has allowed to define a unified US meta-model for the generation of templates relating WHO, WHAT and WHY elements. This meta-model’s elements define a syntax issued from practitioners templates associated with semantics from Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering frameworks, more precisely i*. With a set of US following the templates of this previous model, the link between the US and SA concepts is systematically studied and a transformation process is proposed. The SA can decline agent behaviors aligned with requirements and organizational beh aviors. Moreover, requirements (thus US) are subject to evolution through agile iterations; the SA can evolve with these changes in a semi-automatic manner. We thus argue that the Agent-SA produced with our transformation process contributes to the overall project agility.